


O Paradis

by PlaidAdder



Series: Missing Pages [2]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, M/M, One Shot, POV Sherlock Holmes, Pre and Post Reichenbach, The Final Problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 12:22:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14213082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: To commit to paper even one of the thoughts that torment me at this moment is a reckless indiscretion for which I can find no justification, save for the certainty that if I cannot relieve my mind in some way, this instant, it will snap altogether. Lest my self-indulgence overwhelm my sanity in the following pages, let me first give one direction to myself and one to the reader, if reader there be. To myself: never again attempt to attend the opera. It is too dangerous. To the reader: I cannot stop you from reading these pages, for I know what human curiosity is. I can only ask you to burn them afterward.****Holmes tells the true story of what went down at the Reichenbach Falls. Spoiler alert: it's not what you read in the papers.





	O Paradis

May --, 1891

To commit to paper even one of the thoughts that torment me at this moment is a reckless indiscretion for which I can find no justification, save for the certainty that if I cannot relieve my mind in some way, this instant, it will snap altogether. Lest my self-indulgence overwhelm my sanity in the following pages, let me first give one direction to myself and one to the reader, if reader there be. To myself: never again attempt to attend the opera. It is too dangerous. To the reader: I cannot stop you from reading these pages, for I know what human curiosity is. I can only ask you to burn them afterward.

I do not speak of any physical danger. Moriarty is no more, and Moran is utterly ignorant of my whereabouts. The disguise I have adopted is practically quite effective, though entirely uninteresting from an artistic point of view. As an elderly Italian count of diminished appetites and reduced means, I pass unnoticed in this out-of-the way watering hole, and by affecting a very scant knowledge of the English language am able to evade conversation with my fellow-countrymen. It was precisely this confidence in my own physical safety which led me to venture forth tonight to the Teatro Comunale. I took every precaution. I waited for the bills to announce an opera which would evoke no associations, by a composer for whose work I have no great love, with a plot for which no intelligent spectator would, as Coleridge says, willingly suspend disbelief. Thus fortified against disaster, I sallied forth in search of some mild stimulation from some moderately affecting music. It is fortunate that I did not reserve a box. There was, therefore, no one well-placed to observe the process of disintegration that took place when the tenor--a pompous man and a wooden actor--strode onto a stage which looked nothing like what he was about to describe and began to sing about his beating heart. They were, of course, performing in Italian; but I nevertheless heard, or let me say _felt_ , it in the original French.  _Pays merveilleux! O paradis! Tu m'appartiens!_

For most of my life, I did not admit the existence of paradise. But those days are past, along with the fleeting moment when I could have said, with the same intimate address, with the same unfounded but unshakeable confidence,  _you are mine._

The stage and its tawdry decorations dissolved into the darkness. My body remained in its disguise, in its seat, in the Teatro Comunale. Into my ears the poisoned sweetness of Meyerbeer's aria continued to pour. But  _I_ was, in some terrifying and involuntary way, transported to the darkness of that hotel bedroom at the Englisher Hof, the night before our planned excursion to Rosenlaui. Once again, I lay on my back, gazing up at the ceiling, drawing up the coverlet with my two hands, listening to Watson settle into the room's other narrow bed. Earlier that day I had used every skill of which I was master to persuade him to return home. I was vexed, I told myself, at his resistance; and yet, can I deny how much his obedience would have hurt me? There in the dark, however, one last expedient occurred to me.

"Watson," I said.

"Yes, Holmes?" he answered, as the bedclothes rustled. 

"Does Mrs. Watson know where you are?"

The rustling died away. Then he said, "I sent a letter to her at the Forresters'. She understands that we are somewhere on the Continent pursuing an important case, the details of which may one day be known to the public, but must be for the moment a closely kept secret."

"Would it not be better for you to return to London before her visit ends? It will be some time before I can safely do so; and we must part company some day. I hate to think of her returning to find you gone, with no definite word of where you are, or when you will return."

The room was so dark I could only vaguely make out his recumbent form in the other bed. I heard a low, half-suppressed sigh.

"Holmes..."

His voice died away. I kept silent, and waited for him to speak again--as he had so often kept silent while waiting for some revelation from me.

"Holmes, Mary is not really away upon a visit. That is--she is, but--"

After another and longer pause, I began to feel alarmed.

"My dear fellow, what is the matter?" I asked.

"Mary and I have separated."

This was perhaps the first time in our association that Watson had truly surprised me. I turned in bed, raising myself on one elbow, and strained my eyes in a futile attempt to see, through the darkness, the expression on his face.

"I am so sorry," I said. "I...I had no idea."

How, indeed, could I possibly have failed to deduce something so momentous? As if he had followed my thoughts, he said, "We did not want you to know. We have told no one, save the Forresters. We hope it will be temporary."

After that, he stifled a sound which he had made unwillingly, and evidently determined not to trust his voice any further. I certainly could not allow him to perceive the slightest spark of the fire that his statement had kindled within me. Waiting in silence in Miss Stoner's bedroom, expecting at every moment for that serpent to strike, was child's play compared to the pain of lying in silence while that hidden fire devoured my vitals. It seemed, then, as if it had always been this way between us: Watson dropping peacefully off to sleep, while I--pricked by the anticipation and terror of whatever secret I was keeping--sat open-eyed, bidding goodbye to any chance of rest, waiting in fevered anticipation for daylight and the chance of action.

I waited for the change in his breathing that would leave me safe with my own unpleasant thoughts. But it was long in coming. 

"Of course," he finally said, "the fault is entirely on my side."

"My dear fellow," I said, at a loss. "Pray do not give yourself the pain of explanation. I know you are a man of honor, and I have only the highest admiration for Miss Mor--for Mrs. Watson. I understand that this change must cause both of you pain, and for that I am sorry. You need not fear that I am forming any sort of invidious hypothesis as to the cause. I do not have sufficient data."

Nor, I felt quite strongly at the time, did I _want_  sufficient data. He evidently divined this, for he fell silent again.

"To be apart from me," Watson concluded, "is precisely what Mary wants. I am not doing her any harm by staying by your side. Now you have played what must surely be your last card; and you have lost the game. I will not return to London without you. Good night."

"Good night," I repeated. But for me, it would not be. It could not be. I slept little, and was not refreshed. I had seen comparatively little of Watson in the past year, and even less of his wife. I had, as I was fully aware, no rational reason to hold myself responsible for what was evidently a change in their affections. I had thought, indeed, that over the past twelve months I had noted in Watson a sort of melancholy which seemed to form no part of his ordinary character; but when I had sounded him subtly on the subject, he had always spoken of his work, how hard it was to build up a practice and how tiring the work of a physician really was. I had, therefore, made fewer and fewer demands upon his time. Evidently this had not helped him.

It was a positive relief to see the sun rise and to set off for Rosenlaui. In the fresh air on the alpine peaks, with all my muscles burning with the effort of the climb, I found the rest and peace that had eluded me that night. I could glance at Watson, toiling along behind me, with perfect equanimity. I had banished, I believed, all thoughts from my mind entirely when that Swiss youth appeared with his fraudulent message. 

I watched Watson read the scrawl, his brows furrowing, his jaw setting. Of course I knew what it said, before Watson told me; Moriarty had once again done exactly what I had expected him to do. I watched Watson fold the note back up, unable to stop myself from thinking:  _this is the last I will see of his hands, this is the last I will see of his face._ Watson glanced from the note in his hand, to the face of the Swiss youth who had brought it, to mine.

He handed me the note. "Read it yourself, Holmes," he said. "If it's true, of course, I can't refuse; but I don't like it. I don't like it at all."

I glanced at it. It was the matter of a moment to determine who had written it, and when, and where. Watson had only suspicion to go on; but in this case, his intuition rhymed perfectly with my deduction.

"Your vigilance does you credit, my dear fellow," I said, airily. "But there are some twenty-three separate indications here that testify to the truth of its contents. It was written, in some haste, by a middle-aged man who learned penmanship on the Continent. The faint aroma of brandy--too faint, I fear, for you to detect--speaks of the sickroom. It is highly improbable that all of these indications could have been fabricated."

I handed the note back to Watson. He folded it and tucked it into his pocketbook, keep his bright eyes on me all the while.

"Then return with me," he said. 

"I? Nonsense. I can be of no use to this unfortunate Englishwoman, and I am, for once in my life, thoroughly enjoying my holiday. You go on; I will wait for you at Rosenlaui."

Only my repeated reminders that this imaginary Englishwoman's time on earth was evidently quite limited persuaded him to give up and turn back without me. I saw him look back at me, uneasily, before he disappeared below the curve of the hill. When I looked again for the Swiss lad, he had of course disappeared.

I let out a long breath, and with it, the anxiety of the previous night seemed to leave me forever. Though the mists were rising round me, I could now see clearly, all the way to the end of my future on this earth. My death in these falls, while painful to me, would be preceded by a few precious moments of headlong and ecstatic flight. Watson would return to London, and, if he felt any grief for me, console himself in the arms of his wife. I knew Mary Morstan. Mrs. Watson could not be so different from her. Watson had said they hoped the separation would be temporary. Surely my disappearance would provide the occasion for which they must both be longing--the crisis that would break down the barriers between them, and bring them back together into that embrace I had observed so long ago on the grounds of Bartholomew Sholto's house.

I was in the act of finishing a note to Watson when I heard Moriarty's feet coming up the path behind me.

I turned to face him. He paused on the path, his face obscured by the brightness of the sun behind him. His shoes sank into the soft mould. I saw his eyes burning beneath that high-domed, pallid forehead. The hand that clutched his walking stick trembled with rage.

"Professor," I said, folding the note with studied nonchalance. "I have been expecting you. Please allow me a moment to conclude some necessary business, and I will be entirely at your disposal."

Moriarty's other hand gestured impatiently in my direction. "As you wish."

I laid the note carefully on a little shelf of rock, and placed my cigarette case on top of it. My fingertips still lingered on the engraved silver casing when I felt a sharp, burning, jagged streak of pain tear through the skin of my right shoulder, through the trapesius and into the rhombus minor.

I screamed. There is no other way to put it. I screamed, in pain and in fury, and swung round on him. He had withdrawn the blade, and his right arm was raised to strike again. The knife he held in it was long and narrow; custom made, no doubt, for concealment in his walking stick. With my weakened right arm, I deflected--I cannot truthfully say I parried--the blow. With my left hand, I made to seize his wattled throat. Never before had I felt the pure, blazing, white-hot rage that consumed me at that moment. I wanted to squeeze the life from his body; I wanted to see his blood and his brains spattered upon the rocks. And yet, I was far more furious with myself. What had I imagined? A polite exchange of views, a meeting of the minds, a chivalrous combat conducted according to Queensberry rules? With a man who had made murder his profession, for whom human life was of less value and interest than a mathematical problem, and who understood that I must certainly have the advantage in any hand-to-hand combat? How could I have turned my back on this viper? How could I have so mistaken my man?

My fury mounted as my blood flowed. His throat eluded my grasp. The pain stabbed again, and again. Still furious, I was thrown to the ground, blood from my torn shoulder seeping into the mould, blood from my lacerated breast soaking through my waistcoat, my head dangling off the edge of the path. The mist rose around me. I fixed my eyes on Moriarty's exultant face, as if I could kill him with my own hatred. My left arm was pinned. My right struck out at him, as he tried to bring the knife home. The stroke went wide. He knocked my arm back, planted his left knee on it, and reared back. I saw the knife, black in the air above me, dripping with my own blood. 

I heard a distant explosion.

The full weight of Professor James Moriarty slammed into my chest, forcing the air from my lungs. For a moment I thought I would suffocate. Then the weight lifted. I had a hideous glimpse of Moriarty's shattered head--I am not Watson, I will not describe that horror--before I saw Moriarty's body take flight. It cost me something to wrench myself onto my side. But if it was the last thing I did on earth, I was determined to see him fall.

Lying on my stomach on the path, I watched him disappear into the maelstrom. I shuddered to feel the edge of a knife against my bare skin, just above the waist of my trousers. I heard the cloth tear as the knife slid upwards toward the nape of my neck. He had not said a word; I had not seen his face. But I knew whose hands were peeling back my sodden and torn shirt, whose black bag had snapped open.

"Watson," I gasped.

"Stop," Watson said. "Breathe, and do nothing else. This will sting."

The iodine burned. I closed my eyes, the better to identify the sensations. The pressure; the wadded pad of gauze; the sticking plaster. 

"Don't move. I'll lift you."

His hands slid under my shoulders. I let him raise me into a sitting position. Carefully, he manuevered me round, gently laying me down on my back. I looked up, for the first time since he had left me, at his face.

I could study him at my leisure, for his eyes were fixed on the wound in my breast. He was in his shirtsleeves, the cuffs opened and rolled up, wiping me down with a square of clean linen dipped in alcohol. He had certainly come prepared. His hands were swift, their motion confident, their touch firm. His face was impassive. Only the heightened color above his cheekbones betrayed the presence of any kind of emotion.

"Watson," I began.

"In a moment, Holmes."

He folded up more linen, placed it against the wound, and laid his palm over it, resting his weight on my chest. I understood he was putting pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding; but he could not have known what that was doing to my heart.

"You're lucky his doctorate was in mathematics," Watson said. His voice was not harsh, exactly; but I could not call it warm. "He certainly knew what he was aiming for; but he'd no idea how to reach it."

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"If you ever tell me another lie like that one," Watson said, "we will part company. I give you my word of honor on that."

Finally, his eyes met mine. Anger blazed in them. And then, it subsided. And in silence, as the blood from my heart beat against the pressure of his hand, the universe convulsed. My heart beat again, and we were both reborn.

"You saved my life," I said.

"I hope I have," he replied.

"And killed Moriarty."

"I had no choice." Watson lifted the pad. He appeared satisfied with the state of the wound, and began to bandage it. "Any British jury will see that."

I tried to sit up. Watson pushed me back down, firmly, and with a rather dangerous glare. Taking a painful breath, I said, "Watson, it will not _be_ a British jury. You are in Switzerland."

"A Swiss jury, then."

"You can't seriously be intending to turn yourself in," I said.

"What else should I do? I found him holding your head over a precipice, with a bloody knife actually in his hand. I fail to see--"

"Watson..." I closed my eyes, turning my head away. "Watson, you don't understand."

"I understand that you tried to send me away so that Moriarty could murder you," Watson said, a bit sharply. "I understand that you made the enormous error of assuming that because he was your equal intellectually, he was your match in every other way. He was never your match, Holmes. He was always beneath you."

I nodded. 

" _I_ am your match, Holmes."

"I know," I said.

To prove it, I suppose, I began to cry. And to prove it, I suppose, answering tears gathered in his eyes.

"Then what is there to understand?" Watson said, gently.

He laid down the last piece of sticking plaster. He slid his hands under my shoulders, and lifted me gently into a sitting position. I looked into his faithful brown eyes, and wished with all my heart that I could find some excuse not to answer the question.

"There are others," I said.

Watson settled me, dropped his hands, and fixed me with a challenging stare.

"You told me that Moriarty was the only one who had escaped."

"I was not being...entirely truthful."

"Holmes, you--"

"Colonel Moran has also eluded them, along with Moriarty's brother, two other ringleaders, and half a dozen small fry."

Watson's jaw set. I knew what his expression meant. I said, "Watson, you cannot shoot them all."

"I'm not leaving you," Watson said.

"I don't  _want_ you to leave me!"

As soon as I said it, I knew I had been longing to say it for years. The breath that formed that sentence seemed to have come from every cell in my body. My left arm seemed to follow the air as it left me, reaching toward that open and honest face. I drew him toward me. Suddenly his arms were round me, his hands avoiding the torn and swollen flesh at the back of my shoulder. I saw his lips part. I closed my eyes.

I trembled. I shook. I fainted. I burned. I fell. I rose. I knew. I knew. I knew.

What I feel now, scratching this onto these pages in a shabby Italian hotel bedroom by the light of a single candle, is nearly enough to kill me, and yet it is nothing to what I felt then. When our mouths parted and I looked into his eyes again I was still in pain and still bandaged and still precariously balanced on the edge of a narrow path over a deadly abyss, but I feared nothing and neither did he. The most insurmountable difficulties melted away before us. Everything became absurdly simple. If I were known to be dead, my enemies would cease to pursue us. To accomplish this, Watson had only to return to the Englischer Hof, 'discover' that they had never sent that note, become alarmed, and return to the spot with the appropriate authorities. I would so arrange things that they would conclude that Moriarty and I had met, fought, and gone over the cliff together; then I would conceal myself on a narrow ledge that I had discovered just above the path. They would return, with their results; Watson would beg a few moments alone on the path with my memory. This acceded to, he was to wait until they had descended out of sight before crying out and then concealing himself in the woods. They would return, and deduce (with the help of the evidence I would create for them) that Watson, distraught over the tragedy, had either jumped or fallen to his death. The two of us would then escape through the woods in the dark, to resume our lives under new identities, in a place as yet to be determined. He favored Italy. I preferred Hungary. We would settle it later. The gunshot might have been heard. Someone might already be on his way to the place.

He understood. He nodded. He took up his coat from where he had dropped it, and helped me into it. He strode away from me. And then he turned back, and clung to me. Everything burned again. The very falls seemed to be molten, gilded by the afternoon sun. The ache I felt when he tore himself away throbs in me now, each pulse more painful than the last.

I began rearranging the evidence on the path. I had just managed to conceal myself on the ledge when I heard thunder from above. I looked up, and saw the boulder coming. And behind it, I saw the form of Colonel Moran, at the top of the slope above me.

I braved the first boulder, and the second. At the third, I scrambled back down to the path. I ran into the woods and kept running. I had half my strength and no weapon. Watson had been walking for half an hour in the opposite direction. I could not hope to face them alone and win. Speed was my only asset, and flight my only recourse. I had to run. I had to survive. I had to stay alive.

It was only after I had secreted myself in a hollow tree on the other side of the German border that I realized the true difficulties of my position.

Watson would, by now, have returned to the path. He would send the men he'd brought with him away. He would then, of course, immediately climb up to the ledge to see that I was all right. And he would not find me there.

What would he do then? He would search the area. And he would find the note, under my cigarette case, in which I had said my farewell to him.

Surely he would realize I had written it before my contest with Moriarty. Surely he would deduce for himself what had happened.

So I told myself. But I, alas, knew my Watson. There was no "surely" about it.

I was a  wounded and bloodied fugitive in a borrowed coat, with no money and no identifying papers, hiding in the woods from a gang of murderers bent on revenge. I had no way of contacting Watson; he had no idea where I was. Possibly, he did not even realize I was still alive. Possibly, he believed that I had never intended to travel with him. And he had told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I lied to him again, he would leave me forever.

I clutched my knees to my chest, shivering in the cold and the dark, as the skin of the old dead tree did its best to shelter me. Possibly. These things were all possible. But possibly, this was temporary. Possibly, he would make the necessesary inferences. I had underestimated him before.

I went to Italy. That was where he had wanted to go. It was in Venice that I read of my death in the papers. It was in Florence that I learned that my friend and chronicler, Doctor Watson, had returned to London.

To London. The one place he knew for certain that I could not go. Either he believed I was dead, or he wished that I were.

No one in the world knows that Sherlock Holmes is in Florence. No one ever will.

My skin is healing. My blood is, most of the time, quiet. Nothing burns. The ache, I had thought, was diminishing.

Then I went to the opera.

 _O paradis._ It the "O" that undoes me. The last vestige of the vocative, the only case in which I can now address him. O  marvellous country, glimpsed for a moment. _You belong to me_. The tenor sings it in chains, standing on a stage meant to represent an Africa which--he thinks--belongs to him simply because he sees it and loves it. He sings as if singing will make it his. He tells it that it  _must_ belong to him. He refuses to know that he is wrong. He is every imbecile Englishman on every foreign shore. And he is Sherlock Holmes, sitting in a chair in the Teatro Comunale, falling to pieces. O paradise. O lost world. Oh my dear, dear, darling man.

THE END

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The opera Holmes is listening to at the Teatro Comunale is Meyerbeer's "L'Africaine." Vasco da Gama is the character who sings "O pays merveilleux." It's rarely performed because it is more problematic than Madame Butterfly, Turandot, and Aida all rolled together. But the aria was made famous by Caruso, under the title "O Paradiso." You can find recordings of him singing it on YouTube.
> 
> Much of this was inspired by reading "Final Problem" to my daughter and being struck all over again by all the problems with the story. The note from the "Englishwoman," of course; but also the fact that Watson just says, hey, Mary's away visiting, I'm happy to go incognito to the Continent with you for a couple weeks under conditions of extreme secrecy. Watson also notes that his practice is thriving (for once) and that he had seen very little of Holmes in the past year.


End file.
